Milly Mossop

The Inn at Freshford, Bath

If you've been paying attention you may have clocked that my good friend Kitty got hitched last month. 07/07/07 to be precise, which I guess makes her and Mr Kitty very, very, very lucky.

I don't want you to blub over your keyboard so I'll spare you a detailed description of the heart stopping romance of the day, of the palpable love that filled the church and lifted the roof from the rafters, and the ear to ear perma-grins of the congregation.

No, I'll tell you about the pub instead.

The reception wasn't actually in the Inn at Freshford , it was in a marquee in Frisky's Field next door. But naturally one doesn't want to be late for a wedding, and since the pub is less than a 5 minute walk from St Peter's Church, almost everyone congregated in the Inn beforehand.

This is a classic English country pub, surrounded by fields, with a river gurgling just over there, and a large, safe beer garden for children to run riot in (not usually a criteria for me, but thought it worth mentioning in case it is for you).

Of particular note however, is the home brewed beer - Tunnel Vision - or at least the Inn at Freshford Manager also runs the Box Steam Brewery (a micro brewery) that brews it. Or something. To be honest I had to google quite extensively just to find that, all I remembered was an excellent ale that came with a matching T-shirt, and some marketing blurb behind the bar.

Also of particular note, now I come to think of it, was the outstanding professionalism of the main bar tender, who may well have been the landlady, or at least manageress. In the face of probably 50+ wedding guests, all gagging to get their last liquid sustenance before a dry patch in church, and a never ending trail of ramblers - many of whom, to my intense and unjustified frustration, ordered tea and coffee - this lady never stopped smiling, helping and serving. Later in the day I saw her personally escort an elderly customer to his car and wave him off before returning to the bar catching an order as she went. As impressive to me as juggling with no hands.

All in all, a perfect wedding, a perfect marriage, a perfect day, and a perfect pub? Perhaps too perfect. Nothing wrong with a few laughter lines and silver hairs. And after all, with so much perfection everywhere else that day, the bar was raised very high indeed.

The Royal Oak, Lower Bristol Road, Bath: PERFECT PUB CONTENDER ALERT

Often when Mozz and I are whizzing round country lanes in Wales, Shropshire, or wherever we might be, I encourage him to explore an especially tiny road-to-nowhere looking lane - not (just) because I want to test his tolerance and the savvy of Tom Tom lady, but because it is my firm belief that the holy grail, the Perfect Pub, hides down such a lane.

So it is with a mixture of confusion and confidence that I'm bumping The Royal Oak in Bath into, thus far, the top 5 of Best British Pubs. It's a pub in a city. Albeit on the edge of a quite diddy, picturesque city and equally on the edge of stunning countryside.

Keeping to a theme from the last post, I've skipped a month or so to the night before Kitty's wedding to the talented and charming Mr Kitty, more of which to come in the next post.

A gang of five of us, Mozz, me, Gandolf, Rhino and my brother Pinkerton, had begun our journey from London with high hopes of being in Bath by tea time (aka beer time). 2 punctured tyres and several very tiresome hours of arguing with the car hire firm later, we eventually arrived in time for last orders.

It being July in Bath, and me not being terribly organised, we were staying in a small B&B outside the city centre - luckily however, as we rounded the final (ish) corner to our destination, Pinkerton spotted a sign on the side of a pub that heralded 'CAMRA pub of the year 2007' and hope tugged at our hearts like new born pups on their mother's teat.

After a swift check in at Ashley Villa (clean, sufficient, great value) we trotted down the hill and over the bridge to the Royal Oak.

What an array of ales! And what a perfect beer garden (especially for post 01/07 smokers). And what an agreeable extended licensing hour on Friday!

I wish I could tell you the ales we had, as they were all full of character and amusingly named. Perhaps Pinkerton could help me out here with a comment?..

I've always said that perfect pubs are circumstantial; what is perfect one day may not be the next, and indeed after our arduous journey perhaps a Wetherspoons would have felt perfect. So just to be sure, we returned to The Royal Oak on Sunday for a quick beer, and found it had lost none of its charm. Maybe charm isn't the right word though - a quaint, ivy clad, licensed stone cottage in Oldeworldville this ain't. But for a wide range (10 pumps) of locally brewed and guest ales, knowledgeable bar staff who demonstrably enjoy their work rather than suffer it, and modest but generous decor and furnishings, this place really can't be bettered.

My only regret is that we inadvertently, but briefly, upset the landlord - a mishap involving a full ashtray and his recently planted herb garden - and if he's reading this I can only apologise again on behalf of the five dickheads from London sitting under the patio heater. Friendliness soon resumed though, and that's further credit to the hospitality of this superb example of how a pub should be stocked and run.